Maggots and Morals 1 Maggots and Morals : Physical Disgust is to Fear as Moral Disgust is to Anger Spike

242 words): Putrid food, fetid smells, disfiguring diseases, and a variety of bodily products are disgusting. Incest, bestiality, and many moral transgressions are also disgusting. Does disgust refer to a single emotion, or more than one? Theorists disagree. Many researchers have treated disgust more or less as a homogeneous emotion with a set of prototypical experiential, expressive, physiological, and functional features. Others have proposed two broad clusters of emotional experience, physical disgust and moral disgust, and elicited them using different stimuli. We argue that from an appraisal theory point of view the two kinds of disgust involve different appraisals and thus different experiences, physiologies, action tendencies, and motivations to regulate expression. We hypothesized that physical disgust shares attributes with fear and moral disgust with anger. Using the GRID data, we found that some of the attributes associated with disgust overlapped with those associated with fear, whereas a different set of attributes overlapped with those associated with anger, suggesting two different kinds of disgust, physical and moral. Moral disgust and anger are characterized by a constellation of features— most notably the attribution of agency to another person, the violation of social norms, the presence of value-laden judgments, and the urge to approach and punish. Physical disgust and fear involve no value-laden judgment, but a sense of weakness/submissiveness and an urge to avoid and comply. These finding raise new questions about the role of agency, emotional complexity, and cultural-linguistic variations in the two kinds of disgust.